BY:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
3 November 2022 (Washington, DC) - So I read “What Moneyball for Everything Has Done to American Culture”. I mean, who DOESN'T love a thrilling data analytics story? Well, let’s narrow the scope of the question: what MBA, engineer, or Certified Financial Analyst doesn’t love a thrilling data analytics story?
Give up? The answer is 99.9 percent emit adrenaline and pheromone in copious quantities. Yeah, baby. A winner! The essay in the “we beg for dollars politely” publication asserts:
"The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful. Seeking strikeouts, managers increased the number of pitchers per game and pushed up the average velocity and spin rate per pitcher. Hitters responded by increasing the launch angles of their swings, raising the odds of a home run, but making strikeouts more likely as well. These decisions were all legal, and more important, they were all correct from an analytical and strategic standpoint".
Well, that’s what makes outfits similar to Google-type, Amazon-type, and TikTok-type outfits so darned successful. Data analytics and nifty algorithms pay off. Moneyball!
The essay notes:
"The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore".
Is the author talking about baseball or is the essaying pinpointing what’s happened in high technology user land? I was never keen on baseball. It's like watching grass grow, or paint dry.
My hunch is that baseball is a metaphor for the outstanding qualities of many admired companies. Privacy? Hey, gone. Security? There is a joke worthy of vaudeville. Reliability? Ho ho ho. Customer service from a person who knows a product? You have to be kidding.
But he is right: the quantitative revolution in American culture has gutted American culture - it is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity. Culture might be the most important thing in life precisely because it’s about living - not just staying alive.
The whole essay is quite good and worth your time. I especially like the last paragraph:
"Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?"
Unlike a baseball team’s front office, we can’t fire these geniuses when the money is worthless and the ball disintegrates due to a lack of quality control.
But I'll give my boss, Greg Bufithis, the last word. As he notes in his book-in-progress:
"Spend some time with this and you'll find that the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic and data concepts go rampaging through non-economic and non-data realms. Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of ... well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past - and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. C'est la vie".
